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Hublot has recruited contemporary visual artist Daniel Arsham into its collaborator fold. Last week it released the Arsham Droplet, the replica hublot watches for sale world’s first sapphire crystal pocket watch – and Arsham’s first timepiece as an official Hublot ambassador.

The Droplet can be worn/used in three different ways: as a pocket watch, a pendant, or a table clock. Crafted from titanium (the case), rubber (bumpers) and sapphire crystal (a Hublot specialty), it measures 73.2mm (length) x 52.6 mm (width) and is 22.5 mm thick. The shape of the pocket watch is an asymmetrical droplet, unusual in itself when you think about the fact that, outside of Cartier, 99% of timekeeping devices are perfectly symmetrical. Timekeeping is a symmetrical business!
Presented replica hublot watches for sale with two newly Arsham-designed titanium chains, each featuring Hublot’s double “one-click” system, the links on the chain mirror the bubble-like structure created inside of the sapphire case, which looks almost like a microscopic close-up of foam bubbles. The piece can be worn multiple ways from a necklace to a pocket watch, or displayed as a sculptural centerpiece on its decorative titanium and mineral glass table stand. There are of course Daniel Arsham-branded touches all over the timepiece: the chain, the color, the Arsham monogram stamped on the surface and the use of the Arsham studio green. We can see, loud and clear, that this is an Arsham collab piece.
The timepiece/pocket watch/sculpture (I really don’t know what to call it) comes equipped with manual winding caliber Meca-10, which boasts a 10-day power reserve. I’m not sure anybody needs 10 days of reserve for their sapphire crystal pocket watch, but hey, this is Hublot and more is more. Despite looking materially techy, the timepiece has an organic feeling to it. The droplet feels smooth in your hands – a tactile little ticking organism that you can caress and grip. It’s soothing.
The Droplet is a bold departure from traditional Swiss watchmaking; I mean surely that’s expected from this collaboration. The MO here is to disrupt. Arsham (much like Hublot) is divisive. He can often inspire an eye-roll amongst those who consider themselves discerning culture consumers. But, Arsham is also one of the most globally recognized living artists. What’s unique about him in this context is that his art does in fact bear a relationship with the concept of time in his exploration of decay, specifically the aesthetic of erosion on modern objects.

There is no empty ambassador spiel about his “relationship with time,” because replica hublot watches for sale his point of view on the subject feels worth listening to. “So much of my work is about thinking about the past and connecting it with the future – it’s like mixing times,” Arsham said during the launch last week. “This object looks like something from the past, it recalls this way of telling time that’s from another era, but it feels like a kind of technology of the future… the watch is more than just an object to tell time, it’s a sculptural proposition.”
Working with world famous contemporary artists has thus far been a successful formula for Hublot. There is always a very clever method to the brand’s madness. Undoubtedly Hublot wakes up every morning and thinks “what can I do differently today?” – a brazen stance for any Swiss watch brand. But the ripple effect of creating a watch with a globally recognized artist means exposure to corners of the consumer public that would simply never notice you otherwise. And selling a run of 100 LE watches doesn’t seem like a hard task, given the breadth of the artists’ existing fanbase. These sorts of collaborations, if done sparingly enough, can really only do good for Hublot.
Arsham, himself, is an eccentric creature. He often wears replica hublot watches for sale the same cream or beige colored uniform, the same baseball cap and the same orange tinted or black shades every day. He is a celebrity figure who maintains an enigmatic stage persona. As an observer, the Daniel Arsham effect feels like it’s all been very carefully constructed. His behavior, his speech delivery, his product, the partnerships he takes on – it’s all part of a very well thought out and lucrative Daniel Arsham Studio ecosystem.
No doubt Arsham has a singular point of view, a view which many respect. But perhaps his greatest achievement has been to capitalize so successfully during this era of collaboration, wielding dollar profit and celebrity from his personal branding and style more than his actual art. The same can be said of Murakami. Hublot is smart to recognize the power of collaborators like these. It’s all about finding artists with identifiable enough markers that can be translated into a conceptual watch. It’s Pop Art in product form.

Today, the role of the artist as a frontrunner for counterculture has given way to large commercial endeavors and very clever marketing. Arsham is an artist, but above all he’s an extremely marketable product. His brand is commercially viable enough to collaborate with giant LVMH brands like Hublot and Tiffany, “easy” enough to be consumable for the masses, and just “cool” enough to keep the intrigue running. Even if the Droplet isn’t your cup of tea, the pocket watch feels so entirely replica hublot watches for sale and also so entirely Arsham that you can’t knock either party. It’s a respectful 50/50 split of design ideals.

Hublot x Daniel Arsham is a deal that will likely yield millions of dollars for both the brand and for Arsham. Love it or hate it, I am certain you will have feelings about it. And surely that is a win for Hublot.

The Girard-Perregaux Laureato has gone through so many mutations and transformations since the design was first introduced in 1975, that it’s hard to think of a single model that really embodies its essence. The first Laureato, after all, was a thin quartz watch and it represents a period when not only GP, but the Swiss watch industry as a whole, was struggling to find a way through the Quartz Crisis.
That the first Girard-Perregaux Laureato was a quartz watch, not a mechanical one, is significant as well; GP was one of the first Swiss brands to offer a quartz watch. The first in-house GP quartz movement was the Elcron caliber, which came out in 1970 and ran at 8,192 Hz. In 1971, however, the GP-350 caliber debuted – this was the first quartz movement with a crystal vibrating at 32,768 Hz, which has become the frequency standard for almost all quartz movements made, right up to the present.

Some people find the Laureato’s design derivative of the Royal Oak, but I don’t see it that way – there are some, I think, fairly trivial similarities, including the use of an octagonal bezel, but if you put the two watches side-by-side they seem to me to clearly be going after different effects. The Royal Oak has a much more visually aggressive, overt angularity which the Laureato manifestly is not trying to ape; instead, it’s shooting for a slim, relatively unobtrusive vibe that, the steel case and eight-sided bezel notwithstanding, has much more to do with the mid-century ideal of a thin, elegant dress watch than it does with the flashy geometry of the Royal Oak. Whether this is or isn’t a good thing is a matter of taste, but the original Laureato is, I think, fundamentally a much more conservative design than the Royal Oak, at least in terms of its underlying aspirations.
The original Girard-Perregaux Laureato, therefore, wasn’t just an attempt to use a modern design idiom to achieve the feel of a traditional thin dress watch – it was an attempt by Girard-Perregaux, and by extension the Swiss watch industry, to assert itself as a leader in both aesthetic and technical modernity; not for nothing did it proudly say “chronometer” on the dial of the original Laureato. It’s on the same continuum with later, even more extreme examples of ultra-thin quartz horology, like the Omega Dinosaure or Concord Delirium, and it’s also an ancestor to later thin, integrated bracelet quartz watches such as the 1980 Piaget Polo (another now-classic design that started out as a quartz watch, with the caliber 7P in 1979 and 8P in 1980).
Girard-Perregaux Laureato was exclusively a quartz watch for quite a long time (it was used as a vehicle for quartz complications as well) and, interestingly enough, the first mechanical Laureato didn’t come along until fairly late in the game. In 1995, GP introduced a mechanical Laureato with its in-house automatic caliber 3100. The 3000 family of movements was first introduced, just the year before, in 1994, and like the original Laureato, they are rather conservative in certain respects – they’re relatively small by modern standards, at 11 1/2 lignes, or 25.60 mm x 3.36mm, for the caliber 3300 (the caliber 3000 is a 10 1/2 ligne movement). However, this is comparable to the ETA 2892, which is also an 11 1/2 ligne caliber (and 3.6mm thick). The 3300, which is used in the just-released 38mm Laureato watches, is a fairly high-beat caliber, at 28,8000 vph.

The 3000 family of GP movements, by the way, has found its way into some interesting watches from other brands. MB&F uses the 3300 caliber as the basis for a number of its Horological Machines, where its dimensions and general reliability give a lot of flexibility in overall design and mechanical implementation; in 1996, Vacheron Constantin used the GP 3100 as the Vacheron Constantin caliber 1311, in the first series of the Overseas watch – the first new model launched by VC after it was acquired by the Vendôme Group.